The Tuchel Heath (Tucheler Heide, Bóry Tucholskie) and Kashubia (Kassubei, Kaszuby), the two regions comprising the geographical region known as Pomerelia (roughly the area of the “Polish Corridor”), came into Prussian possession with annexations from Poland in 1772, when Friedrich II seized most of what would become the provinces of Poznania and West Prussia from the ailing Polish Republic. These territories, some liked to imagine, resembled the North American frontier. Friedrich II apparently compared it to Canada and “jokingly named the inhabitants his Iroquois.” Gustav Freytag immortalized Friedrich's arrival on the frontier in his work Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit, characterizing the place as “an abandoned land, without law, without authority; it was a wasteland.” Certainly, the harsh climate, the sprawling pine forests and barrens, and the impoverished populace suggested a certain affinity. In one description of the region from 1879, the author depicted the Slavic game poacher “as a red Indian on the warpath.”

Over the past two decades, a number of scholars have called into question the existence of any meaningful relationship between Nazism and the occult. This article paints a different picture. First, virtually all Nazi leaders appeared to recognize the widespread popularity of occult practices and “border-scientific” thinking across the German population and within the Nazi Party itself. Second, although Adolf Hitler's Reich Chancellery, Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, and even Heinrich Himmler's Gestapo consistently advocated anti-occult policies or pro-enlightenment campaigns during the first six years of the Third Reich, most Nazi officials worked to differentiate between popular or commercial occultism, which they deemed ideologically “sectarian,” and acceptable “scientific” occultism, which was generally tolerated and intermittently sponsored by the regime. Third, the regime's reticence to eradicate even popular or commercial occultism—indicated by the fact that the environment for professional debunkers became more hostile with the outbreak of World War II––reflected the popularity of supernatural and border-scientific thinking within the German population. Indeed, whereas some Nazis intervened on the side of occultism for reasons of public opinion, many did so because they truly believed in its “scientific” value.

This article focuses on the joint campaign of “remigrés” and American authorities to “westernize” the local Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Berlin during the early Cold War. The years 1948 to 1958 witnessed one of postwar Germany's most bitter intraparty struggles for leadership within the Berlin SPD, where a faction of remigrés led by Ernst Reuter and Willy Brandt wrestled for control with the so-called Keulenriege around Franz Neumann. Examining clandestine American support for the remigré faction, which included favorable media coverage and considerable financial contributions, this article focuses in particular on the political maneuvering of a German-American network around Shepard Stone, political advisor to U.S. Commissioner John McCloy. An investigation of the postwar power struggle within the Berlin SPD offers fresh perspectives on three related subjects: the role of remigrés in postwar Germany history; the political clout of informal German-American networks; and West Berlin as an alternative laboratory of German democratization.

The essays in this special issue all focus on the city of Berlin, in particular, its relationship with its margins and borders over the longue dureé. The authors—Kristin Poling, Marion Gray, Barry Jackisch, and Eli Rubin—all consider the history of Berlin over the last two centuries, with special emphasis on how Berlin expanded over this time and how it encountered the open spaces surrounding it and within it—the “green fields” (grüne Wiesen) referred to in the theme title. Each of them explores a different period in Berlin's history, and so together, the essays form a long dureé history of Berlin, although each of the essays in its own way explores the roots of Berlin's history in deeper time scales, from the early modern period, to the Middle Ages, and even to the very end of the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago.

Consideration of political life in modern Germany has often centered on two main issues: classically, the vicissitudes of the national state; more recently, the impact of the creation of an industrial society on existing structures of power and on the position of ruling elites. Without denying the centrality of these questions, an exclusive focus on them can obscure the importance of other factors in German political development, both in their own right, and in the way they mediated the experience of state-building and industrialization to different sections of the population. Two such relevant factors are regionalism and confessional identity.

To order an untidy past, historians identify and interpret significant pivots in the development of nations. One such pivot in the fractured history of twentieth-century Germany was the period between 1945 and 1949. In these brief postwar years, a remarkable “mutation” of German politics and society began under Allied tutelage. In this interregnum between Hitler and Adenauer, a war-devastated West Germany started on the path “from shadow to substance.” As the Bonn Republic endured, historians started to trace its origins back to certain political and economic structures first erected in the postwar years. Increasingly, they emphasized postwar Weichenstellungen, or turning points, which influenced later events. By the 1980s, this structuralist view strongly suggested that contemporaries of the years 1945–1949 had actually lived through the Vorgeschichte, or prehistory, of the Federal Republic, and of affluence.

The purpose of this article is to analyze, using the example of Franz Mehring, the growing cleavage between German left-liberalism and social democracy in the 1880s. Due in part to the radicalization produced by Bismarck's anti-socialist law of 1878 to 1890, Marxism was firmly established within the German socialist movement in the 1880s. The reverse of that process, the growing ideological and political rigidity of left-liberalism, is less well treated. In this article, I will outline the program of social reform proposed by the then left-liberal journalist, Franz Mehring, to German liberalism in an effort to build a coalition of middle-class and working-class democratic forces in Imperial Germany. Mehring's failure was instructive both for his own intellectual and political development and for what it tells us about the relationship between social democracy and liberalism in Germany.

Sudden defeat on the battlefields of Jena and Auerstädt in 1806 inflicted a crushing blow on the Hohenzollern state. The ensuing devastation resulting from the Napoleonic war left Prussia with a crushed military organization, a bankrupt treasury, a shattered economy, and a government in chaos. The Treaty of Tilsit, dictated by Napoleon, humiliated Prussia and made it a rump state with half its former territory. To all observers, the defeat represented not only Prussia's military weakness, but also her social, political, and economic backwardness compared to Napoleonic France. Liberals inside and outside the government saw the crisis as a long-awaited opportunity to reform their government and society. The situation was so critical that it convinced the timid, indecisive King Frederick William III to summon Baron Karl vom Stein, whom all Prussia knew as a resolute advocate of reform, to head a new ministry. Stein's government, which lasted from October 1807 through November 1808, produced volumes of draft legislation designed to restructure the civil and military administration as well as the economy and society of Prussia.

Iregret that David Abraham's lengthy, bizarre, obfuscating, and often mendacious reply to my charges requires me to impose on the generosity of CEH once again, but readers will understand why I insisted that Abraham not be allowed to have the kind of “last word” granted him in the AHR. In my article, I deliberately refrained from a discussion of the various circular letters sent around by Abraham, myself, and others for the simple reason that most readers would have no direct means of checking the evidence for themselves, that the whole affair had been utterly confusing, and that it was most appropriate in this journal to concentrate on what had appeared in print. This is not a tabloid, but a scholarly journal, and I find the airing of Abraham's personal grievances against me inappropriate in this forum. The way in which I treated Abraham can have no bearing whatever on the reliability of his book or other writings. Although I initially contemplated writing a detailed reply to Abraham's plaints, I have concluded that this would be an abuse of CEH's hospitality. Since this is a historical journal, however, falsifications of the historical record and certain charges should not go totally without comment, and I will now make a number of brief responses to certain of Abraham's charges for that purpose.

When the First World War ended, Germany experienced an unprecedented period of political revolution, economic turmoil, and social upheaval. Among the myriad problems facing the nation was one concern that cut across party lines and prompted attention at both the national and local levels. Lawmakers, doctors, clergy, and ordinary Germans across the political spectrum agreed that the breakdown of the family had weakened the nation, contributed to military defeat, worsened economic misery, and exacerbated societal conflict. High divorce and illegitimacy rates together with an alarmingly low birth rate created a picture of families in crisis. The belief was widespread that only by creating policies that strengthened families would Germany stand a chance of regaining its historical strength. Because both Weimar and National Socialist policymakers saw the family as essential to rejuvenating the battered nation, the interwar era witnessed a wide variety of family-directed policies. Social welfare, unemployment benefits, health insurance, and maternity benefits were just the beginning of a series of programs designed to strengthen Germany and support families. While state programs targeted many different groups within society, children stood out as especially worthy recipients. Policymakers in both the Weimar and National Socialist eras recognized that children, the most vulnerable members of society and the nation's future, required special attention.

Great public figures can bestride the public stage in life—but be buried privately. Kaiser Wilhelm II despised his father, Friedrich III. Having established his legitimacy through his central role in his grandfather, Wilhelm I's, funeral, he refused Friedrich a public funeral and staged a private funeral so perfunctory the widow refused to attend. Otto von Bismarck, to spite Wilhelm II for having fired him, directed that his funeral should be private and at his country estate, denying Wilhelm the grand public display in Berlin he had planned.

Historians in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), unlike their western counterparts, could never allow themselves the luxury of studying the past for its own sake because, in this Marxist-Leninist state, history and politics were always inextricably linked. The GDR's leaders were committed communists who had long recognized history's apparent political power. They were convinced that, for the new “Workers' and Peasants' State” to acquire legitimacy among its own people, a German historical narrative, based on the ascertainable “scientific” laws of Marxism, was an essential requirement. East German citizens had endured twelve years of anti-communist Nazi rule and, consequently, the task of integrating them into a republic, where an entirely different set of political values predominated, was a fairly daunting undertaking.

In the midst of the upheaval created by military defeat, the collapse of the Hohenzollern and other German monarchies, and the threat of radical social revolution, a movement that had been taking shape for some time became a visible presence in German public life. Intellectuals, writers, visual artists, and numerous others declared that they would no longer remain aloof from the world of politics, social reform, and even revolution. On the contrary, they would seek to merge the arts and politics into a synthesis that would help to mold a new and greatly improved society. They issued manifestos and programs, founded organizations and journals, joined political parties — primarily on the left — and went to the streets, at least to observe if not also to act. The majority of the participants in this movement were, at some point in their careers, part of new artistic trends and, as such, contributors to the formation and advancement of aesthetic modernism in Germany.

The politics of history and memory culture have recently been the topic of increased discussion again—and this discussion has by no means been cool-headed, but hot, with a high potential for conflict. An argument is ongoing in the public sphere over which (hi)stories are present and visible and which are not, who is being recognized and who is not, as well as what is being forgotten, repressed, or tacitly accepted in this context. Corresponding to this general development, a debate is currently ongoing in the German press that has been dubbed “Historikerstreit 2.0,” or “the historians’ debate reloaded.” The controversy was initially sparked by a discussion about the Cameroonian intellectual Achille Mbembe, his position toward the State of Israel, and his involvement with the BDS movement, before continuing on to a discussion about Michael Rothberg's book Multidirectional Memory when it was published in a German translation. Finally, the debates deepened with the controversy surrounding Dirk Moses's polemics concerning an ostensible “German catechism” with regard to Holocaust commemoration.

After an agreement between Nazi Labor Front Leader Dr. Robert Ley and Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach on December 8, 1993, providing the necessary organizational background, one of the most curious experiments in National Socialist educational policy was launched. The first Reichsberufswettkampf, or Reich Vocational Contest, brought more than half a million young people3 between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one together and encouraged them to compete against each other in fifteen professional fields, between April 9 and 14 of 1934. At the end of the month, fourteen boys and six girls were summoned to Berlin to be declared “Reich Victors,” in the presence of highest government and party plenipotentiaries.